Thursday, February 21, 2008

let's get this party started

Download installer above, save, and double-click on the installer to run.

Make sure the installer is pointing to the html directory inside your Homeseer directory (for most people, this will be C:\Program Files\Homeseer 2\html, which is the default)

HomeSeer 2.x is required. An iPhone or iPod Touch is recommended, but you can also use the site in pretty much any browser you choose, though it'll look odd since it's designed for narrow screens.

To use, point your browser to iphone.asp on your HomeSeer 2 server. For example, if your HomeSeer web server runs on the IP address 192.168.0.20 on the default port 80, tell Safari to visit http://192.168.0.20/iphone.asp

The iPhone needs to be on a network (EDGE, WiFi) that can access the HomeSeer server, of course. You can verify by removing iphone.asp from the URL and see if you can see the default HomeSeer web interface. If not, you are probably trying to use EDGE to access a HomeSeer server located behind a firewall/broadband router/NAT device, in which case you'll need to learn about port forwarding. Google is awash with much information on this matter. Be advised that you'll definitely want to protect HomeSeer from the general public by protecting access with a password.

Known issues:

Compose switches display strangely and with the default rover icons. I don't have any compose switches, so this is difficult for me to work on at the moment.

Thermostats display with the default rover icons. If someone would like to take time to make iphone-optimized icons, I'll be happy to include them in future builds and credit your work.

If loading the site cold via the home screen, the iPhone attempts to load the page over EDGE before activating WiFi. If your site isn't publicly accessible, you'll need to hit refresh once WiFi is live. This is an iPhone issue.

Controls (on-off toggles, dimmer sliders) which appear to support dragging don't. This is a shortcoming of the iPhone WebKit which does not currently support these type of controls. Tap a toggle (on/off) to switch between on and off. Tap on the position of the dimmer (left is off, right is 100% on) to switch to that level of brightness.

Many thanks to Frank Perricone for Rover, which was the foundation for this program. The majority of iPhone For HomeSeer's code is Rover.

For now, the easiest way to contact me for support is to visit the HomeSeer forums, in the Web Server and Interface sub-forum. I'm bobwondernut on those forums, feel free to PM.

I sincerely hope you find the app useful! Let me know bugs or suggestions you'd like to see in the app.

14 comments:

I'd like to have actions for infrared device buttons. I've looked at the iphone/rover code and generally comprehend how Rover id's the device location names and status. There is no handling of infrared devices other than to show them as status only.

Would it be possible when a device type is infrared to handle it so as to build a page with the buttons locations set in homeseer, as the Touch-Pad plugin does. And using the button image and row column specified in homeseer?

Does anyone else have an issue where making a change to a device while using this iPhone web app causes HomeSeer to block the phone.

I am able to get my devices to display and make 1 change(set a light to 50%) and then I am blocked from further access. The page will just not load. I tried making some adjustments to my config file but it still is block(on my home network or on 3G)